Will Wright Puts His Foot Down

What would you do if you saw your “work of art” remade to be completely wrong?

SimCity is an open-ended city-building computer and console video game series originally designed by developer Will Wright. It is published by Maxis (now a division of Electronic Arts). The game was first published in 1989 as SimCity, and it has spawned several different editions sold worldwide. The ongoing success of SimCity has also sparked the release of many other spin-off “Sim” titles, including 2000’s The Sims, the best-selling computer game up until approximately 2012.

SimCity‘s sixth major release was announced on March 5, 2012 for Windows and Mac OS X by Maxis at the “game changers” event.

EA has been roundly thrashed for the rocky launch of SimCity, and Will Wright — who designed the original SimCity title and co-founded studio Maxis before leaving for other projects — says the company should have seen it coming. Wright had a very strong opinion on the game. He thought the game was very good, but then he suspected backlash on the DRM.

Will said:

“That was basically inexcusable, that you charge somebody $60 for a game and they can’t play it. I can understand the outrage. If I was a consumer buying the game and that happened to me, I’d feel the same.” While EA has denied that the always-on requirement for SimCity was meant as DRM, the generally single-player nature of the game made the constant connection seem unnecessary at best.”